Aesop's Fables, translated by Laura Gibbs (2002)

A young boy had gone far off into the desert where he was catching crickets
to put them in cages. When he noticed a scorpion in their midst, he mistook
it for another cricket. The boy reached down to pick the scorpion up off
the ground, whereupon the scorpion pointed his sting at the boy, ready
to stab him, and said, 'If you had gone so far as to touch me, I would
have set both you and your crickets free!' This fable shows that you should not treat bad people the same way
that you treat good people; rather, you should deal with each of them
in the way that suits their character.

Note: For the practice of catching crickets for their song, see Theocritus
1.

Source:
Aesop's Fables. A new translation by Laura
Gibbs.
Oxford University Press (World's Classics): Oxford, 2002.
NOTE: New
cover, with new ISBN, published in 2008; contents of book unchanged.